State and Local

TRENTON, N.J. — May 5, 2015 — Most New Jersey anglers will tell you that taking home even one striped bass is no easy feat.

Legislation signed into law Monday by Gov. Chris Christie makes bagging a second fish even harder.

The new stricter regulations signed into law change the state’s minimum size and catch limits from two fish at a minimum size of 28 inches each to one fish between 28 and 43 inches and a second fish no smaller than 43 inches.

The change is being imposed to comply with a mandate from the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission, a regional agency that sets fishing quotas for East Coast states.

Read the full story from the Burlington County Times

AUGUSTA, Maine — April 30, 2015 — A legislative committee voted unanimously Wednesday to reject a bill that would have once again blocked alewives from reaching the upper sections of the St. Croix River.

It took lawmakers on the Marine Resources Committee less than 10 minutes to dispatch L.D. 800, which had been the subject of an hours-long public hearing two days earlier. Lawmakers voted in 2013 to reopen the upper St. Croix to alewives after years of heated debate.

“I didn’t really hear anything new on Monday,” said Rep. Walter Kumiega, D-Deer Isle, the committee’s co-chair. “It was a unanimous vote two years ago.”

The bill’s supporters, led by registered guides and sporting camp owners in the Grand Lake Stream region, contend that alewives were never historically present in the upper river because several waterfalls or natural formations blocked their upstream passage. They also blame alewives for the collapse of smallmouth bass populations in Spednik Lake and other lakes, when barriers at several dams were removed to allow upstream migration during the 1980s.

Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald

April 30, 2015 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources:

DARTMOUTH, Mass. — April 28, 2015 — UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Divina Grossman and officials from the University’s School for Marine Science & Technology (SMAST) praised legislators in the House of Representatives Tuesday for their continued commitment to invest in fisheries research to pursue accurate data.

An amendment, filed by Rep. Antonio F.D. Cabral, would provide $450,000 for the Division of Marine Fisheries in collaboration with UMass Dartmouth to assess the biomass of fish.

“I want to thank Chairman Cabral and his House colleagues who have demonstrated how valuable this funding is to the important collaborative research at SMAST,” said Grossman in a news release. “UMass Dartmouth is fully committed to research that strengthens the scientific basis for fisheries management, which is critical to the social and economic development of the region.”

Read the full story from the New Bedford Standard-Times

April 29, 2015 — Pogies are readily available in good numbers and are easy to catch if you can throw a cast net.

Steve Shook is known for two things: using live pogies to catch big speckled trout and fishing the rocks of East Timbalier Island.

Shook has notched up three 10-pound speckled trout in his life: a 10-pound, 1-ounce fish he took in December 1989 on a smoke-colored plastic shrimp on a jig; a 10-pound, 2-ounce fish caught in June 1989 on a live pogie near Belle Pass; and a 10-pound, 8-ounce fish taken with a live pogie from Fourchon Beach.

Note that none of the fish came from East Timbalier proper.

Strangely, the idea for fishing for speckled trout with live pogies came to him while he was slow-trolling with pogies on a down-rigger for king mackerel off of North Carolina. Pogies are excellent kingfish bait.

Read the full story from the Louisiana Sportsman

April 28, 2015 — One of the last seals of the season was spotted waving goodbye on the beach in Rockaway Park on Monday morning.

Springtime marks a changing of the guard in marine wildlife, as many seals move north out of our inlets and bays and Humpback Whales arrive from more southern waters.

Over the weekend, a seal, this one entangled in some kind of netting, was spotted in Brooklyn near Kingsborough Community College, according to the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, an organization that aids injured marine animals.

The Brooklyn seal darted back into the water before Riverhead workers could get to it.

The foundation encourages anyone who spots the injured seal or any other whale, seal or turtle to report it to its 24 hour hotline and help determine whether or not the animal is injured.

 
Read the full story here

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — April 27, 2015 — The EPA’s decision to ship PCB-contaminated material from the harbor offsite rather than burying it on the shoreline is a positive step but does not mean the clean-up fight is over, officials for the Buzzards Bay Coalition said Friday.

The EPA announced at an educational meeting Thursday that plans to place PCB-laden contaminants in confined disposal facilities, known as CDFs, have been scrapped. Instead, the material will be shipped to a PCP-regulated landfill in Michigan.

Environmentalists, including representatives of the Buzzards Bay Coalition, had raised concerns that these disposal facilities could expose residents to airborne PCBs and other potential hazards.

After studying the issue, the EPA decided that shipping the material offsite rather than keeping it on the shoreline was the “most effective and efficient’’ solution, said Kelsey O’Neil, community involvement coordinator for the EPA.

Read the full story from the New Bedford Standard-Times

NEW BEDFORD — April 27 —  The Port Society of New Bedford has ended its partnership with the fledgling Fishing Heritage Center just months after it was announced.

Late last year the two parties announced the Heritage Center would be located in the Mariners’ Home, which is about to undergo a restoration. Part of the Heritage Center was to be in the Seamen’s Bethel, which will be connected to the Mariners’ Home by a glass corridor.

The project is the recipient of a conditional $440,000 Massachusetts Cultural Council facilities grant, which requires matching funds from the Port Society.

Fred Toomey, president of the Port Society, described what appears to be a mutual misunderstanding of what was to be done with the Heritage Center. “We were working together and everything was moving forward at a good pace,” Toomey said. “They established themselves as a 501(c)3 (nonprofit organization). Then things kind of fell apart.

Read the full story from the New Bedford Standard-Times

April 22, 2015 — This seaport landed $379 million worth of seafood in 2013, mostly scallops, making it the leading U.S. fishing port in terms of dollar amount of fish and seafood landed.

New Bedford and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia were the only two ports on the Atlantic coast that rank in the top 20 American ports in terms of value.

The numbers are according to the United States Seafood Report issued by Icelandic bank Íslandsbanki's research department.

Read the full story here